Bangalore: After the launch of data operations business service in 2014, SquadRun Inc., a marketplace for mobile workforce on-demand was working on its second service offering SquadVoice – a voice based on-demand call centre solution around November 2015.

While, SquadVoice service aimed to help businesses to set up an on-demand call centre in just few clicks without any major investments in infrastructure, according to SquadRun ‘s CTO Vikas Gulati, initially there were some key business and operational challenges with the service prototype.

“Since players or call agents were using personal mobile phones to call customers of businesses to perform calling based tasks or missions, there was a major risk of exposing personal contact details and other vital information on both sides – call agents and businesses,” says Gulati.

“Besides, for every call, these agents had to record each and every customer conversation and tracked for quality purpose using a separate call recording app and then upload it back into our application. However, this entire task process with appearing scrappy and cumbersome. In addition, they were incurring high cost on mobile bills,” explains Gulati.

Due to those complex challenges, players or agents were under performing calling tasks and also businesses were not fully convinced on information privacy. Hence SquadRun wanted to have a comprehensive technology solution that could address those challenges and concerns in a simple way.

“Along with Exotel, we had evaluated Knowlarity and one more similar player. However, Exotel differed from other players in terms of features and it fitted well in our needs with its APIs, which are well documented,” shares Gulati.

Post the evaluation, SquadRun carried out the deployment of Exotel’s privacy solution and completed the integration in short duration.

According to Gulati, the integration was straight forward, simple and seamless with SquadRun’s backend applications and subsequently the mobile device based Android app was upgraded and integrated as well.

Since the solution deployment, personal and vital business data like customer and lead information is not exposed directly between the agents and customers of businesses. SquadRun’s mobile app has been upgraded with Exotel’s number masking solution, so the agents just have to click the call button on the app.

“We are using Exotel solution on a subscription basis and calls are charged on pulse rate,” Gulati informs about the pricing model.

Besides, the solution offers call recording feature, so SquadRun is able track and check of each of the call conversations in real-time for quality purpose. Many of the manual processes have now been automated, resulting into higher efficiency for SquadRun’s business operations.

Although Gulati doesn’t shares the actual user base due to competition, but he does say that over 40,000 agents have registered with the app so far.

It been six months, since SquadRun implemented solution and already it is seeing significant benefits. “Our calling bound tasks have increased by 25-30 percent and also the adoption rate of calling tasks compared to data tasks have jumped by almost 4 times more,” says Gulati.

Gulati adds that the calling costs have been reduced due to standardize call rates which was not in the past, so it is highly cost effectively for players /agents and also work efficiency have gone up for businesses as well.

Moreover, Gulati points out that there’s a big synergy between Exotel and SquadRun. “Since Exotel is a market place for businesses, we come into Exotel’s picture on calling operations and are now part of the ecosystem,” he concludes.

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